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this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2023
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It HAS to be on purpose. Nobody can get to billionaire levels of wealth and be completely inept, right? RIGHT?
Begin rich makes one feel infallible. Thinking one's self to be infallible leads to these kinds of decisions.
It's probably worse when one has convinced himself one's suceess so far was 100% personal skill, rather than 90% luck and 10% skill.
Unfortunately, once you get enough money the system is designed to keep you wealthy no matter how much you fuck up.
Like, Trump has had multiple failed companies including casinos thay failed because he had them competeing with each other.
Yet while he's probably not a billionaire he still has the status of "wealthy" and managed to fail into the most powerful position in government.
Musk had more money, and therefore can fuck up way harder and still be fine. He could burn Twitter to the ground for all the effect it would have on him.
The reason is that they know people with money, and those people listen. For example, Musk only had to post about his attempt to buy Twitter in a groupchat, and he got Billions of Dollars from them to do it, unchecked. Regular people don't get their ear, and even if they do for some unfathomable reason, everything is checked meticulously.
Lol i just cant imagine that level of ineptitude.
Am I living in a simulation?
The level of ineptitude is common, the combination of wealth and that much ineptitude, usually less so, given being able to afford the best education and advisers. So it takes a special sort of billionaire to be this inept.
While that's true, I think it's more that rich people tend to insulate themselves from actually driving direct actions most of the time, so we see their stupid decisions after they've filtered from the Board, to the CEO, to the VPs, to the directors, to the managers, and finally, to the workers that actually do things. Really stupid things filter slowly back up as impossible, or as they hit snags over weeks and months, so it takes a couple rounds for them to really mess things up. Not to mention people softening the edges as it passes through the chain to make it more reasonable.
Elon being front and center, and actually ramming things through is what makes this so uniquely inept. Normally we wouldn't know that all of these terrible ideas are straight from him, and blame could be shifted around to scape goats.
Agreed.
His initial wealth of 42 million dollars came from working on travel software. He used that wealth to become rich by founding x.com, a payments company that failed. How does a failing company lead to massive wealth you might ask? Well, that failing company merged with PayPal.com, and Musk was CEO of the merged company for about 6 months before he got fired. PayPal went on to be huge, so after he was fired he made his fortune on his shares. Next he invested money in Tesla, bought the title of "co founder" even though he wasn't, waited 7 years passively then noticed the company wasn't going anywhere, replaced an exec or two and then took credit for turning the company around. So yeah, maybe that's his end game? Make Twitter (now x.com) as bad as the old x.com so someone merges and gives him stocks and fires him again?
And yet, despite all that, this somehow still feels notably inept, even for a man whose primary goal in life, at the moment, appears to be demonstrating how thin his attachment to reality grows by the day.
It's just the Dunning-Kruger effect at work, he thinks because he successfully ran a rocket manufacturing company to viability that he's definitely going to be able to run a social media company too.
Turns out the B2B style government contract model isn't exactly the same as B2C social media advertising model.
I'd argue that it's Drunning-Kruger plus being surrounded by stupid yes-men that agree with everything you say or do
Do we know for sure? He could just be so arrogant he doesn't acknowledge advice.
It was on purpose. Its completely obvious the powerful right in America wanted Twitter gone. I bet it could have swung the overton window with how much influence it had.
Sounds like it's time to re-watch Glass Onion. Elon Musk is Miles Bron.